The challenge of producing fusion power is hugely complex. Fusion neutrons are produced when a deuterium-tritium (D-T) or deuterium-deuterium (D-D) plasma becomes very hot so that the nuclei fuse together, releasing energetic neutrons. To date, the most promising way of achieving this is to use a tokamak; in the conventional tokamak approach to fusion (as embodied by ITER), the plasma needs to have high confinement time, high temperature, and high density to optimise this process.
A tokamak features a combination of strong toroidal magnetic field BT, high plasma current Ip and, usually, a large plasma volume and significant auxiliary heating, to provide a hot stable plasma so that fusion can occur. The auxiliary heating (for example via tens of megawatts of neutral beam injection of high energy H, D or T) is necessary to increase the temperature to the sufficiently high values required for nuclear fusion to occur, and/or to maintain the plasma current.
The problem is that, because of the large size, large magnetic fields, and high plasma currents generally required, build costs and running costs are high and the engineering has to be robust to cope with the large stored energies present, both in the magnet systems and in the plasma, which has a habit of ‘disrupting’—mega-ampere currents reducing to zero in a few thousandths of a second in a violent instability.
The situation can be improved by contracting the donut-shaped torus of a conventional tokamak to its limit, having the appearance of a cored apple—the ‘spherical’ tokamak (ST). The first realisation of this concept in the START tokamak at Culham demonstrated a huge increase in efficiency—the magnetic field required to contain a hot plasma can be reduced by a factor of 10. In addition, plasma stability is improved, and build costs reduced.
WO 2013/030554 describes a compact spherical tokamak for use as a neutron source or energy source. An important consideration in the design of spherical tokamaks is the protection of reactor components from the high neutron flux generated by the fusion reaction. This is of particular importance on small tokamaks as the neutron flux (i.e. neutron flow per unit area) will in general be higher due to the smaller surface area-to-volume ratio of the plasma vessel.